Tolls rarely cover the full cost of the brand-new roads they’re attached to.

Tiny, toll-sucking Delaware pays the second-highest share of state and local taxes and fees for its drivers. (That rhymes well with the tollbooth bottleneck on Interstate 95 that distinguishes it to many East Coast travelers.) After that, highly populated, highly congested states that use tolls, fees, and taxes to control congestion and pollution make up most of the top ten. At number three, New York State reaps about $3 billion dollars per year from Port Authority and MTA bridges and tunnels alone. Ranking fourth, Florida has the most toll roads in the country. New Jersey, Maryland, Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan, and California fill out the rest.

But funding transportation with taxes and fees paid by users—as opposed to drawing from, say, a general fund—serves a useful psychological purpose. When drivers cough up to travel crowded streets or highways, they attach a certain value to their drive; when they pay nothing—as in most cases—the roads seem “free.”

Yet driving gets paid for, eventually—not just through other taxes, but through the price of an apartment and a load of groceries (the passed-on cost of parking), the unimaginable hours lost to traffic congestion, the vast amounts of energy consumed and climate-altering gases emitted, the air that’s hazardous to breathe. By and large, these costs are externalized. Besides paying for roads, user fees—particularly per-mile driving fees, and congestion pricing, both of which are mostly untested in the U.S.—would help drive those costs home.

About the Author

Laura Bliss is a staff writer at CityLab, covering transportation, infrastructure, and the environment. Her work also appears in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles, GOOD, L.A. Review of Books, and beyond.